


Indiscretions, Youthful and Otherwise

by A Kiss of Fire (TigerDragon), TigerDragon



Series: Prerogative of the Brave [2]
Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Arguing, F/M, Family, Minor Character(s), Parents & Children, Police, Runaway, Street Fight, Superpowers, property damage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 11:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Domestic accidents, frayed tempers, children with painful pasts and mutant powers that could level city blocks - it's just another fall day at the Xavier Mansion. But sometimes the smallest things have the biggest consequences, and family is where you find it.</p><p>So's truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indiscretions, Youthful and Otherwise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Penknife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/gifts).



> At first glance, this story might seem the least connected to our Christmas collection - it's not even set during Christmas, after all, and there's no femslash to be seen. But when we really dug down and looked at the themes of the collection as a whole, chosen family and its complications loomed extremely large. This fic is all about that, and it features some of our favorite characters from _Degree of Hope_ , so we hope you'll all forgive us the liberty.
> 
> I've chosen to gift this fic to Penknife as a thank you for all the inspiration, humor, joy and cathartic sorrow I've taken from his/her work over the last few years, because I don't think I could have written _Degree of Hope_ or brought any of these characters to life without the example of that kind of clarity, gentle humor, carefully layered drama and historical sensitivity. So thank you, Penknife, for everything. I hope you enjoy the story.
> 
> Merry Christmas to one and all,  
> Dragon

There was a hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom. As a matter of fact, not only was there a hole in the ceiling above Charles Xavier’s bed, there was also a hole in the floor of the library above it, and in its ceiling, and in the floor of the solarium above that, all the way up and out through the roof of the mansion itself. It was fortunately still a very sunny day, because if it had been raining the water would have descended squarely through two floors and an attic to ruin his mattress. It was, a part of his mind noted in a particularly dry bit of scientific observation, a very impressive demonstration of the application of linear force. His wife was quite possibly going to be fascinated before she remembered to be annoyed.  
  
Turning his gaze away from the interesting destruction, Charles fixed an exasperated stare at the brown-haired boy sitting sheepishly on the bed. Both Scott and the luxurious coverlet were covered in a fine dusting of plaster.  
  
“Please explain to me,” Charles began, pinching the bridge of his nose, “What you were doing in our bedroom in the first place.”  
  
“Well....” Scott reached up to fidget with his glasses, then dropped his hand away as though the glossy ruby quartz lenses might burn him if he touched them. They wouldn’t, of course - they were perfectly cool to the touch despite the pressure of the energy reflecting between them and his irises, which was yet another of the oddities of Scott’s abilities which Charles was perfectly prepared to admit were fascinating when they weren’t blowing holes in things.  
  
Say, for instance, his bedroom.  
  
The boy took a deep breath, folded his hands in his lap, then unfolded them again and squared his shoulders. There was nervous energy coming off him in waves. “Miss Lehnsherr - I mean, Mrs. Xavier said that we would work on the differential calculus equations when she got home if I’d finished all my problems, and I didn’t want to miss that because last time she got home in the afternoon I was in the library with Jean and I didn’t know until after dinner. When she was busy.” _With you._ The thought was so clearly present it might as well have been shouted, and there was a hard spike of something that might have been jealousy in it. Or maybe it was just the normal anger of a child for the more distant parent. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Teenage boys, Charles was coming to discover, were almost painfully _loud_ inside. “So I came in to find our notebook and then I guess I got distracted with the problems so I sat down on the bed to work on them and I must have fallen asleep. Mr. Xavier. Sir.”  
  
Charles shifted his stance. “Scott, we’ve talked about respect for privacy,” he said, careful to address only the boy’s words and actions. Sometimes it was hard to ignore the internal storms that no one wanted him to know about. “I wouldn’t have minded if you’d only asked me to get the notebook for you.”  
  
“You were busy. With the phone.” Scott shifted his shoulders, and Charles could feel the boy’s stubborn streak like a kind of iron forming out of the air. “I was only going to be a minute.”  
  
_He and Erika could teach intractability to stones._  “That doesn’t matter,” he scolded, “You shouldn’t have come in here in the first place.”  
  
“I know, okay?” The boy raked a hand through his hair, and his frustration was a throbbing red weight in the air. “I know, and now there’s a hole, and what do you want me to do about it? Sleep in the woodshed?”  
  
Lips pressed tightly together, Charles inhaled sharply, thinking of the nights he himself had spent among cords of pine wood. “No, of course not. You’ll clean up the dust and debris, and when the contractor arrives you’ll help with whatever he needs. You’ll explain to Erika when she gets back.” He stepped forward, patting Scott on the shoulder. “No real harm done. Though if you’re nodding off without warning you should probably go put on your visor.”  
  
Scott shifted back from the touch, and his anger was a hot spike against Charles's skin - almost a slap. “I hate that thing. It looks stupid. I don’t want to wear it.”  
  
Frowning, Charles stepped back. “It’s safer than the glasses. What if someone had been in the library?”  
  
“Well, they weren’t! And I’m tired of you treating me like a... like a bomb or a gun or something!” The boy reached for his face to wipe a hot tear from his cheek, and when his fingers touched the glasses he swore angrily. “ _Miststück!_ I hate this, and I hate you, and you explain to Miss Lehnsherr, and I’m not wearing that stupid visor!”  
  
Nostrils flaring, face flushed, Charles bit his words out as he clamped down on a wave of anger. “If this is how you’re going to behave, young man, you clearly aren’t responsible enough to see the nuclear reactor demonstration next week.”  
  
There was a sudden silence, the kind that follows a cannon’s explosion or comes between the lightning and the thunder, and Scott’s face was suddenly very pale and very set. His breath grated between his teeth, and the storm of shame and frustration and anger was suddenly frozen into an icy rage that burned all the way through his skin. “That’s private,” he said in a tight whisper, and took a long step back from Charles. “That’s private and our secret. Miss Lehnsherr said it would be a secret. Did you read it from me? Did you read it from _her?_ ” His hands were shaking now, and he put his back to the door as those invisible eyes of his burned into Charles’s face. “You come in here lecturing me about _privacy,_ you fucking hypocrite?”  
  
Closing his eyes, biting his lip, Charles laid out his next words with taut deliberation. “I’m sorry, Scott, I didn’t realize that was private.” He ran a hand through his hair in frustration.  “But you know I can’t help hearing thoughts sometimes. You certainly could have helped walking through this door.”  
  
“So when I can’t help using my powers I get to clean up the mess, but when you do it’s just something you can’t help.” Scott flexed his hands, and his anger and hurt were raw in his throat. “I guess some animals really are more equal than others, huh?”  
  
Then he threw the door open and stormed out, slamming it behind him.  
  
Charles stood staring at the bed, dusty and illuminated by an irregular spot of sunlight. “Dear God,” he muttered. “I cannot possibly have been that much trouble at his age.” Sighing, he sank into one of the arm chairs facing the large windows, idly wondering why fate couldn’t have punished his transgressions with something more lenient.  The plague, for instance. He could handle the plague.  
  
It was six hours later, just after dinner time, when he discovered that Scott was not actually sulking in his room. Or hiding in the garage with the cars. Or, in fact, anywhere on the mansion grounds.  
  
_Scott, you bloody stupid boy, you certainly know how to punish your elders._  
  
His wife was going to kill him.

 

 

*********

  
The train was mostly empty at this time of night - most of the people were headed home out of New York and not down into it - and Scott Summers was grateful for the quiet. He’d walked out the door of the house in Westchester angry and hurt, his most important things in the bag over his shoulder and the money he’d been careful to put away where he could get at it in his pocket. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Xaviers - it _wasn’t_ that, he did - but Scott hadn’t spent five years bouncing from one foster home and orphanage to another without learning how to look out for himself. Without learning how to stay light on his feet, if he had to. No matter how many nice things Mister Xavier or Erika got him, he made sure that what really mattered fit in his bag: a few changes of clothes, the four or five books he liked best, the notebook he and Miss Lehnsherr had started a few months after she’d saved him and Heather, his visor. As much as he hated it, it let him actually use his powers for something, and if he decided to stay away he’d need to look after himself. Miss Lehnsherr had always understood that, had taught him to do it better - the first thing you had to do was take care of yourself. That was why she hadn’t been upset when she found out about his little stash of money.  
  
He’d been afraid she would be, or that she’d take it away, but she’d only smiled that strange smile she got sometimes and offered him her hand. “Come and see,” was all she’d said, and then she’d taken him up to the bedroom she shared with Mister Xavier and shown him the empty trunks under the bed and the locked drawer in the wardrobe - the one without a key. The one with false papers that had her picture on them, and a set for Charles, for Heather, for him. That had what must have been almost ten thousand dollars in cash inside.  
  
That held her knife, and her gun.  
  
“It’s not that I’m thinking of running,” she’d explained when she saw the fear in his face, and she’d knelt down so she could look him in the eyes and be sure he understood - she never seemed to have trouble with that, even with the glasses. “It’s just that I have to know I can if I have to. That we all can.”  
  
Then she’d smiled, hugged him, and they hadn’t said any more about it. That was the way things were with Miss Lehnsherr. Once something was settled, you didn’t have to talk about it again if you didn’t want to. Not the way Mister Xavier had to keep going over and over things until he drilled them into your head. Even as he had the thought, he knew it wasn’t fair, but there was nobody around to hear it so he let himself think it nice and loud. _I wish he’d just mind his own business. Does he think I don’t know how big a deal my powers are - that I don’t see everyone looking at my glasses and wondering what happens if I ever forget and take them off or just get angry and look at them? I **know** it’s dangerous, and I just wish he’d stop treating me like a kid all the time._  
  
The train creaked faintly, the way the roof of the mansion creaked at night when a storm hit hard enough, and he jolted a little as they pulled down toward Grand Central Station. It was always a thrill every time he saw it, always, and it gave him a little twinge as he thought about the last time they’d all come down here - ‘Roro and Heather and Miss Lehnsherr and even Mister Xavier.  
  
_Stop it,_ he chided himself. It wasn’t like he’d decided to run away forever or anything. Miss Lehnsherr liked to call him a practical boy, and he probably was. Even with the way he and Mister Xavier were always fighting - which was at least partly his own fault, not that Scott was quite ready to admit that - the mansion was still probably the best place for him. Probably. He just needed a little room to breathe, to think, to clear his head. To decide if he really wanted to go back. He didn’t have to. He could go looking for Alex, his brother, his only real family, but even as he had the thought he knew it was soap-bubble thinking. If Mister Xavier and Miss Lensherr couldn’t find Alex, he was about as likely to do it on his own as he was to grow wings like Uncle Warren’s.  
  
The train stopped, and he picked up his bag and hustled off with everybody else. It wasn’t until he got to the middle of the platform that the really daunting question caught up to him. _All right, genius, you’ve run off to New York. Now what?_  
  
It wasn’t like he didn’t have a place to go - he could always go the Center. Even if he hadn’t been who he was, even if Warren didn’t already know him, the Xavier Community Health and Care Center would have put him up for the night just because he was a mutant who needed a place to stay. That was what it was there for. The problem was that if he did that, he might as well call home right now and tell them where he was going. He wasn’t ready for that yet, if he was ever going to get that way, and he was probably in trouble for running off like this besides. No point in just going somewhere he’d already been three or four times by now.  
  
By the time he’d dodged three or four of the knots of people moving through the crowd pressing in around him, he was about ready to call it all off as a mistake. Then he saw the tattered advertisement for the World’s Fair. It must be six months old, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t been the year before... but still. He rocked on his heels for a minute, remembering the carnival whirl and the jaw-dropping spectacle of the future spreading itself out over a square mile of park, and his heart lifted. He paid a vendor twenty-five cents for a hot dog and a Coke, ate them on a bench while he watched the trains go by, then jumped the 7 train to Willets Point. On the way, he even found the nerve to smile at a pretty golden-haired girl riding with her parents.  
  
By the time she smiled back, he’d decided that he was having a pretty good night after all.

********

The front door of the Xavier Mansion banged open at a quarter past nine, and a slender girl of ten tumbled through it with her red hair spread loose across the shoulders of her too-big brown coat and her face alight with residual delight. She didn’t have the eyes of a girl given to such displays - they were a bright green dimmed and faintly tarnished by too much seeing and too little understanding - but for once her too-serious mouth was spread in a smile worthy of her age. _Scott!_ Her mind went tumbling down the corridors and up the staircases, as loose-limbed and gangly as either of the two older girls she was coming to think of as her sisters, overflowing with enthusiasm. _Scott, I saw dinosaurs and buffalo and ostriches and elk and I learned about where stars come from and the Natural History Museum was amazing and you **have** to come next time, it’ll be so much fun!_ Her thoughts quested this way and that, some of the joy falling out of her face, and her mind turned plaintive. _Scott?_  
  
Erika Xavier, her coat still in one hand and her hat in the other, caught the sudden distress on the girl’s face and went to one knee, brushing a careful hand across that soft red hair. “Is something wrong, Jean?”  
  
“I can’t feel Scott, and I want to tell him all about the museum. Why can’t I feel him?”  
  
There was a hard edge of panic in Jean’s voice, and Erika made her own as soothing as possible as she cupped the girl’s face in a gloved hand. “There, now. I’m sure he is fine. He may be practicing his mental shielding, or you may just be tired. Will you go upstairs and brush your teeth for me? I’ll ask Charles where he is and I’ll tell you when I come up to wish you a good night.”  
  
The girl frowned, fingers clutching at her coat, but the contact and the calm of Erika’s thoughts seemed to soothe her and she eventually nodded. “Okay, Miss Lehnsherr. You’ll tuck me in?”  
  
“Of course.” A kiss on the girl’s forehead and a few gentle tugs to remove her coat, hat, scarf and gloves sent her up the stairs to wash up for bed, and Erika Xavier née Lehnsherr stood in the doorway of the mansion that had been her home for barely two years with an arm full of winter clothing and wondered to herself with a certain dry bemusement when exactly it was that she had become so very domestic.  
  
_I never quite imagined that you would make me so maternal, Charles._ She cast the thought out in the house, thinking very clearly and very carefully to be sure that he heard her, and added the feel of the smile that was lingering on her lips. _Now, will you tell me where Scott is so that I can reassure Jean that he hasn’t fallen off the face of the earth? The girl turns positively fretful every time she can’t feel someone._  
  
A wordless sense of fear and guilt seeped into her mind before her husband’s words did. _Oh, my love...I wish I could tell you._  
  
Her hands clenched, but she refused to conduct the rest of the conversation then and there. It was stupid to risk frightening Jean, when she could so easily hear the two of them thinking at each other across the house. She put away the coats and hats and gloves instead, with methodical hands that did not quite shake, and then started up the stairs at a clip whose measured pace was a poor match for the hammering of her heart.  
  
She found Charles in their bedroom.  He was sitting on their debris-covered bed, staring at a jagged piece of plaster in his hands and turning it over and over again as though inspecting it for an answer to his problems. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice thick with worry. “I appear to have handled the accident rather poorly.”  
  
“Show me.” Erika’s voice was iron twisting under stress.  
  
Eyes closing, Charles let a hand float to his temple, a gesture that he used less and less. He packaged up the memory of the fight and sent it to Erika’s mind, shame and fear twisting his guts. “I’m so sorry. I wish...” He trailed off. Nothing mattered now except that Scott wasn’t there.  
  
“Charles.” She hissed his name between her teeth, hands clenching slowly, and for a moment he was not entirely sure she was not going to strike him. The hard, wild thunder of her fear and worry, clamped down as tightly as she could so that it would not escape the room, ran rampant over his skin like the static at the edge of a thunderstorm.  
  
Finally, what seemed like a small eternity later, her hands relaxed.  
  
“I called Warren, Hank and the Center. They’ll keep an eye out.  I’ve been searching for his mind.” He turned to look at his wife, not sure if he was trying to reassure her or himself. He was trying very hard not to think about armored cells buried deep underground.  
  
“Scott is a very capable boy,” she said softly, without looking at him, “and extremely intelligent. I have no doubt about his ability to take care of himself.” _What I’m less sure of,_ she thought in a corner of her mind that she might or might not have meant to him to see, _is whether we’ll ever see him again._ The idea made her chest ache as though someone had pried it open and seared every surface, and she turned away to the door and laid her hands against it as she wrapped her mind around the iron beams that anchored the old stone and wood of the mansion and tried to draw some of their stability into herself. “We can’t do any more about it tonight, in any case.”  
  
Charles nodded, swallowing through the constriction in his throat. “What do we tell the girls?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Jean hasn’t heard this conversation.”  
  
“We do not start lying to our telepathic ward, Charles. She’s been with us less than a year, and I don’t intend to let you make a mess of things with her trying to protect her.” There was a certain edged venom in Erika’s voice, the residual sting of their arguments about Jean’s stability given fresh sharpness by the situation at hand, and the harsher German consonants of her accent were more pronounced now than he could remember them in the last year. She dragged in a breath, hands still flat against the door, and then straightened herself. “I am going to put her the bed, and tell her the truth - that you and Scott had a fight, and that Scott doesn’t want to speak to any of us right now. If I cannot get her to sleep after that, I will stay with her until morning.” _And if I can,_ she did not say, _I will be spending the night listening to Beethoven and trying to reassure myself that he is not going to vanish into a hole in the ground which we will never find._  
  
Fear clamped a fist around Charles’ heart. He nodded before burying his face in his hands and trying to build a wall around his turmoil. The last thing anyone needed was a borrowed panic. The door opened and shut with a sharp click, and he felt the tight sparking coils of Erika’s mind move down the hallway. She did not try to reassure him.  
  
He was fairly certain he would have been ill if she had.

 

**********

  
Stuffed with a day of fair food and ideas, Scott sat stretched out on one of the benches outside the IBM and listened to the transistor radio the middle-aged man on the next bench over had turned up loudly enough to strain its small speakers. McGraw was pitching for the Mets against Cincinnati tonight, hoping to show that a last-place team still had something to show the half-a-game-from-first-place Reds, and he’d held them scoreless for three innings with three strikeouts and some help from his friends. Now, if only the Mets could do better than pop flies, they might actually have a chance. It was too bad they weren’t home in their new digs at Shea stadium, or he could have caught the game in person.  
  
Sandy Koufax was pitching tonight in Los Angeles. Scott grinned at the thought, wondering if he could catch the game on the radio in one of the little eateries. It’d run late, later than his curfew, but he didn’t have to worry about that now and he loved to listen to Koufax pitch. Even Miss Lehnsherr, who didn’t care about baseball at all, liked Sandy Koufax because he was a Jew and proud of it. _People ought to be proud of who they are, Scott,_ she told him over and over, like it was something to hold on to. _People shouldn’t be ashamed of where they come from, what makes them great._  
  
Sometimes it made him angry, because he didn’t come from anywhere - a bunch of foster homes and orphanages, and now a big house in Westchester, but he didn’t have any family except maybe Alex out there somewhere. It never lasted, though, because then he’d remember the numbers tattooed onto Miss Lehnsherr’s arm and how careful she was not to let anyone see them. Everywhere she’d come from and all her family burned to ashes, and she still held herself so proud and tall when someone at one of Mister Xavier’s stupid parties whispered about his Jewish wife. If she could stare them down, he’d promised himself a hundred times, so could he.  
  
“Other people want to use that bench too, you know.” A girl’s voice, petulantly acerbic. She was probably standing right in front of him.  
  
He reached up and checked his glasses automatically before he opened his eyes, just in case, and there she was. Dark hair and pale eyes - ruby quartz lenses didn’t let him get much more detailed than that on colors - and five feet and change, dressed cheaply and a little ragged, glaring at him like she’d caught him jaywalking. Out of sheer, perverse stubbornness, he took his time stretching before he answered and watched her steam. It was kind of cute. “There are plenty of empty benches,” he finally noted.  
  
“That is not the point. It’s rude.” She glared at him some more, in the hopes that it’d suddenly start working. “I don’t think I like you.”  
  
“You just don’t know me,” he told her, finding himself unaccountably cheerful, and bounced to his feet with his bag slung over his shoulder. “Trust me, I’m Tommy Kirk material.” She snorted skeptically, but the edges of her mouth twitched with the start of a smile, and he was on a roll. “I’ll buy you a hotdog, a soda and a pretzel,” he informed her, “and you can get to know me.”  
  
“You’re impossible,” she told him, but she smiled when she said it. “I don’t even know your name.”  
  
“Scott. Scott Summers.” He offered her his hand and his best James Bond smirk. “Nice to meet you.”  
  
“Capricia.” She took his hand after a few seconds, still trying to look stern and not pulling it off.  
  
Capricia. Great name. _Pretty. I probably shouldn’t tell her that - I bet all the guys tell her that._ He squeezed gently, then set a leisurely pace without letting go. “Food?”  
  
She fell in next to him, laughing in spite of herself. “All right, Scott Summers. Food, and then I’ll decide if you’re a bad boy or not.”  
  
He laughed with her, the world suddenly a lot brighter even in washout red. “Oh, I’m definitely a bad boy,” he said, throwing her a wink, “but I promise you won’t mind.”

 

********

Seated in the comfortable, finely appointed chair that had take her a year to persuade Charles to place in the parlor, Erika Xavier sat very still and kept her eyes closed in spite of the subtle trembling of effort that cruelly dimpled the leather cushions beneath her fingers. Her breathing was very deep and very steady, and her mind was as carefully empty and focused as the optical cavity of a laser. Sight, thought, movement, emotion - they were all distractions, and she shut them out with the same ruthless discipline that had shut out the horrors of Auschwitz, that had ground out the flickers of fear and doubt in her laboratory when an experiment had to be done just so or all would go to waste, that had forced past the ache of her shattered heart when she had thought to leave Charles and all of this behind. She anchored herself into the deep iron bones of the earth and the loftly dance of spheres higher than the sky, and she thought only of what she wished to do.  
  
Before and above her, forty-two ball-bearings spun through the air in intricately layered orbits, their races spinning within them so that the smooth steel balls which allowed them this internal rotation all moved with precisely the same speed. A single bearing stood at the center of the formation, and about it spun ten more, many of which carried their own companions - some only one or two, but one surrounded by almost a dozen that orbited so swiftly and closely that it seemed at every moment they would scrape across each other and draw sparks. They moved as one instrument, each revolving at a different rate and moving at a different speed but all unified as if in a single grand clockwork. Yet it was still not perfect, a bearing slipping here or twisting out of time there, and Erika bore down on the whole with the concentration of a watchmaker as she tried to catch and tune out each small imperfection in the dance of amplified magnetic fields.  
  
A scream, cut off almost before it began, pierced her concentration and the formation nearly flew apart, momentum striving to bury spinning metal in wood panels and drywall, to shatter windows. She clamped down on them, stopping all motion at once even as she stood with her heart thundering in her chest, and they settled to the ground like chastened birds before she at last released them. Only then did she turn and run, her heels clattering on the wood and muffled by the rugs by turns, and the sound of smashing glass and clanging metal was her guide. _Charles?!_ she called out silently, letting her unformed fear drive the thought out across the house, but she heard no reply and could not wait. She paused at the door to the kitchen, hearing the groan and scrape of breaking wood inside, feeling metal whirling and twisting in the air, and she filled her lungs with a deep breath before flinging the door open and stepping through.  
  
The kitchen was a whirlwind of lashing pots and spinning knives, glass shards and fragments of wood dancing through the air as if suspended on invisible strings, and at the center of it floated a girl in a plain blue sundress whose green eyes burned with inner fire and whose red hair drifted about her as though suspended in an unseen sea. Around her was chaos, objects twirling about themselves like bizarre tops or suspended in mid-air as though gravity had taken a holiday. Beside her, frozen and unmoving and somehow untouched, was a lean teenager in jeans and a loose velvet shirt whose dark skin was still flushed with the first sign of fear and whose eyes stared at nothing, wild and unseeing. One of her hands was still against the sink, which had been torn almost in half, and a great spray of water was frozen in glittering, liquid droplets a few inches from her.  
  
Erika’s first thought was relief, because now she knew exactly why Heather’s scream had been cut off - the girl, confronted with a world gone suddenly and violently mad, had done exactly what Erika had taught her to do when she didn’t see any chance of safety or escape. Heather’s mutant ability somehow allowed her to manipulate time, to slow it down or freeze it or to speed it up impossibly, and Erika had seen the potential in her power at once. Still, the girl was as headstrong and impulsive as any teenager, and Erika had known that her natural impulse to take action at all times would need a reflexive counterweight. _If you find yourself in a situation you can’t control or see a way to escape,_ she’d told Heather as they worked through a simple freeze and release exercise with a falling apple, _lock time around yourself so that for you, no time passes. You have some small perception of the world outside one of your stopped points, don’t you?_ And when Heather had agreed, Erika had nodded. _Lock yourself until you hear Charles or I say the word ‘sanctuary,’ or until a full day passes. By then the danger will likely have passed, and if it has not, then you are no worse off than before._  
  
She had barely a moment to relax, however, because the girl with the green-fire eyes turned on her and spoke in a voice that was as sharp as the edge of a scalpel. “Where is Scott, Doctor Lehnsherr?”  
  
“I already told Jean the answer to that,” Erika said very softly, stepping into the kitchen as slowly as she might have approached a tiger. Three knives and a pan whirled toward her, froze as she clenched her fingers, and neither of them paid the quivering steel any mind. “He and Charles had a fight, and Scott was upset. He doesn’t want to speak to anyone, so he’s spending time alone.”  
  
“You’re hiding something,” the girl hissed out between her clenched teeth. “Both of you. Sneaking. Not talking to each other except where we can’t hear.”  
  
“We didn’t want to frighten you,” Erika answered softly, a few of the cookie pans twisting away from the still-spinning maelstrom of battered kitchenware to sweep the air in front of her like a broom, pushing fragments of glass and wood aside as she ducked below a section of stone countertop that had been fractured almost to shattering by the violence of the mental grip on it. “Not until we knew where he’d decided to go.”  
  
“You let him leave!” The girl almost screamed the words, and a serrated blade pulled itself from the floating knife block and hurled itself at Erika. She caught it in in the air, not trying to match the kinetic force that drove it but simply guiding it aside like a rapier parrying a broadsword, and the point buried itself in the kitchen wall behind her. “You all let him leave!”  
  
“ _Mein schatz,_ ” Erika murmured softly, her voice gentle and unafraid in spite of the chill claws of fear digging into her spine, “it is a home, not a prison. Scott is free to go if he wishes, for an hour or for a day or even for longer, but I know that he will come back to us.”  
  
The girl’s voice was like a snarl in the air, and a chair behind her began to slowly snap apart. “How do you know? _Charles_ doesn’t know - I could see it in his head while he was napping. He’s dreaming all the horrible, horrible things that could happen to Scott, and he’s going to _keep_ dreaming them because it’s _his_ fault!”  
  
Erika’s jaw clenched, hot rage blooming in her chest at the thought of what psychic pain this green-eyed demon might be inflicting on her husband out of childish spite, but she kept it buried deep and trusted to the natural static of her own mind and the defenses Charles had taught her while she knelt down so she could meet the girl’s gaze as steadily as she had once met the eyes of her jailors. “Please, _mein schatz,_ let him go. He did a foolish thing, yes, but he meant no harm by it. You of all of us know best that he loves you - all of you - as if you were his own children.”  
  
“Jean,” the child’s soft, furious voice grated. “He loves Jean.”  
  
“He does not understand the difference. You know that. You can see it.” Erika reached out slowly, risking the cuts of what little glass and broken wood floated near the girl so she could touch one delicate hand. “Let him go. Stop, before there is nothing left for Scott to come home to.”  
  
Slowly, terribly slowly, the broken ruin of the kitchen sank to the wooden slats of the floor. The bright touch of Charles’s mind came a moment later, tangled with lingering horror and rising panic, but she held very clearly in her mind the image of him rising from his bed to wash the sweat of his fear away in the shower, then having a glass of tea to settle his nerves. After a moment more, she tasted his consent if not his agreement.  
  
“How do you know?” The child’s voice was not elemental fury and bitter resentment now, but almost plaintive. It stilled the rage in Erika’s own heart as suddenly as if a candle had been snuffed, because the girl whose green eyes still simmered with banked fire was as near as she would ever come to a daughter of her own. She reached out and caught the girl’s small frame in her arms, lifting her carefully away from the shards about their feet, and looked down at her with a small smile on her lips that ached with understanding. A small shake of her head, and that was all - a silent promise to explain - and then she carried the girl from the room and settled her carefully upon a couch in the den.  
  
“I know,” she told those impossibly bright green eyes, “because he and I are the same, and when I was hurt and angry because I had a fight with Charles, I could not bring myself to leave this place either.”  
  
The girl nodded once at that, slowly, as if turning it over in her mind. “He’ll come home?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“All right. I suppose you want me to sit quietly in the corner for a while?”  
  
Erika’s lips quirked up at the edges in a smile that was not so unlike the one the girl had offered her a few minutes before. “It would make things easier, yes.”  
  
“Fine.” The girl closed her eyes, as if in a particularly long blink, and when they opened again Jean was looking up at Erika out of the girl’s face.  
  
“Did something happen?” Jean asked softly. “Did I do something wrong?”  
  
“No, darling,” Erika told her softly, bending to kiss her hair tenderly, “you didn’t do anything. But you must promise to stay here and to wait, while I go and clean up a mess. Can you do that for me?”  
  
“Yes, Miss Lehnsherr.” Jean nodded her agreement, and after a moment or two more of silent reassurance Erika left her to return to the kitchen. It took only a few seconds of concentration to shut off the pipe leading to the sink and position an array of pans and pots beneath the broken basin, and a few more to gather up all the knives and shards of metal cookware with her mind and deposit it on one of the intact sideboards.  
  
Only when that was done did she turn to Heather and say, very softly, “Sanctuary.”  
  
The frozen water fell, splashing down across the broken sink and into the pots, and Heather stumbled forward a few steps into Erika’s waiting hands. “Oh God, Miss Lehnsherr, it’s Jean, she’s...” Heather stopped suddenly, casting her eyes around for a moment, and then visibly relaxed. Her breathing was still ragged and her face flushed with effort as the weight of her exertion caught up with her, but she took in the mess in the kitchen with a composure that made Erika’s heart ache.  
  
“She’s all right?” Heather asked at last, then finally cracked a small smile when Erika nodded. “Well. I guess we won’t have to worry about the sink leaking anymore, at least.”  
  
“No,” Erika said, squeezing Heather’s shoulder and hiding the laughter in her eyes behind a stern purse of her lips, “I suppose we won’t, at that.”

********

On the whole, Scott Summers decided while he rested his forehead against the cool glass of the car window, his first real date out with a girl could have gone better.  
  
Things had started out promisingly enough, once he and Capricia got past the glaring and started on the food and the exhibition halls. She was cautious about him, cautious about the crowds, cautious about everything, but Scott knew how to do reassuring. He’d done it plenty for Heather in the last two years, after all, and this wasn’t all that different except for the part where she wasn’t his more-or-less sister and he kept thinking about kissing her. It was probably a little early for that, but he kept thinking about it anyway, and that made him a little loose with the money in his pocket. That was all right, though, because she laughed when he tried to be funny and stared at the exhibits like they were the best thing since roller skates. She ate like she hadn’t had as much as she wanted in a long time, too, so they stopped at just about every food stand they came to so he could watch her eyes light up when he offered to buy her anything she wanted.  
  
After a while, they’d run out of exhibits they wanted to look at and she’d run out of interest in any more food, so they took a long walk out along the edge of the fairgrounds and watched the sun dropping down past the top of the skyscrapers over in Manhattan. She leaned up against his arm, which was very nice, and talked about her four sisters and three brothers and the diner her mom worked in. It made him a little uncomfortable to hear her talk about that, like he’d done something wrong but he couldn’t figure out what, but she didn’t seem to notice and after a while he stopped thinking about it. Whatever it was, he could figure it out later. When he wasn’t talking to Capricia and she wasn’t leaning on his arm.

If he hadn’t been thinking about kissing her, he probably would have noticed the four boys in jeans and cheap leather jackets noticing them. It was the kind of stupid mistake that Miss Lehnsherr would have giving him a stern look about if he ever mentioned it to her, which he definitely wasn’t going to. Ever. Because talking about thinking about kissing girls to Miss Lehnsherr was something he was never, ever going to be okay with.

The idea made him squirm, which tightened the seatbelt against the bruises on his ribs, which made him wince. _At least,_ he thought miserably to himself, _I didn’t get suckerpunched._  
  
Capricia had looked over his shoulder and flinched, which was his first clue there was a problem. Trying to play it cool involved a look over his shoulder and by the time he did that, he was totally committed to the James Bond thing. Asking them to please go away, for instance, or what the problem might be... well, that hadn’t been in the cards. So he’d said something half-clever, which he didn’t quite....

And then he did remember it, and winced again.

 _“If you guys are looking for a show, go buy a ticket somewhere else. We’re all sold out here.”_ Oh, yeah. That had been really smart.

Then Capricia and the big kid with the crew cut had started arguing in Italian, which was his first clue that he was maybe a little out of his depth. But he wasn’t going to back out, either, and when the guy who was probably in retrospect Capricia’s brother - which he really should have thought of at the time - finally got up in his face, he hadn’t said a word, just tried to look tough.

That had gotten him punched in the ribs for his trouble, which really hurt, and then two things had happened at about the same time - he’d realized he could get his glasses knocked off and level half of Queens if he kept being an idiot, and two years of Miss Lehnsherr teaching him everything she knew about fighting for your life kicked in.

He came way too close to breaking bone on the second guy who’d come after him, and the way the kid had stumbled back clutching his wrenched arm and trying like hell not to cry had made him angry - angry at them, sure, but mainly at himself. _We have to be better than the world is,_ Mister Xavier told them practically every day, _because we have to show them what it means to be better men and women. To be the future._

He’d always thought it was stupid, but standing there in the light of the streetlamps and seeing the look on Capricia’s face, feeling his hands shaking with how easy it would be to bust all four of the guys up bad enough that they’d need a hospital... that’s when it didn’t seem stupid anymore, because it wasn’t just his eyes that could be dangerous.

Admittedly, the whole enlightenment thing had been a little ruined by having to run like a scalded hound to avoid getting or dishing out an asskicking, and by running headlong into the cops who’d gotten called in to break up a street fight, and by both of them immediately assuming he was a street kid with a lying mouth when he told them where he lived.

Handcuffs were also a mood-killer, even if he knew how to get out of them.

“Having second thoughts, kid?” The big Irish guy in the right seat turned around and gave him an ugly grin. “‘Cause if we’re driving our asses up to Westchester just to hear some rich guy tell us he don’t know you, you’re gonna be doin’ some seriously hard time, you know what I mean?”

Scott, who had been seriously considering spending a night in jail and calling Warren in the morning as an alternative to showing up on the steps of the house in handcuffs, stiffened and glared. They’d at least let him keep his glasses when he’d told them he had an eye condition and he spent the whole trip back to the station sitting there with his eyes squeezed shut tight. Apparently nobody had actually seen the fight, so the official charge was being a vagrant, and the desk sergeant had insisted they check it out before they booked him. Just in case. He’d suggested a phone call.

His chauffeurs hadn’t like that at all, had decided they ought to take the kid up to Westchester and show him up for the liar he was, and had been amusing themselves on the drive telling stories about all the nasty things that could happen to a kid in lockup. He was pretty sure he didn’t like either of them at all, and if they were typical, he knew exactly what that tone in Miss Lehnsherr’s voice was every time she talked about the police.

They rode a while longer in silence, and then he saw the lights of the gatehouse and tried very hard not to flinch. They caught it and grinned at each other, which made another hot knife of anger twist around in his gut, and he resolved that he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing him cry no matter what happened next. Even if he had to go back to jail because Mister Xavier and Miss Lehnsherr didn’t want him anymore because of the stupid ceiling, he was going to hold his head up and give them nothing. He knew how to do that.

The big Irishman got out and hauled him out of the car, leaving the narrow-faced driver to grab his bag out of the trunk, and they went up the steps together with Scott between them and still in handcuffs. They traded a look at the door, and the Irishman swore under his breath while he reached for the knocker and banged it hard enough to make the sound echo off the porch.

Miss Lehnsherr opened the door, tall and sharp, her dark curls pinned back in a simple comb and the fine cut of suit declaring her anything but a servant, and when her eyes swept over them, icy in the porchlight, the driver flinched back half a step. The big Irishman just set his shoulders and growled. “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but we’ve got a punk who says he lives here and my sergeant, he won’t let me do what’s got to get done until we check it out. Picked him up in what looked to be a street fight just busting up, running from some greasers, probably over money or some girl. Anyway, I wanna knock off for the night as bad as the next guy, so I’m just gonna ask - you know this kid?”

Scott looked up into Miss Lehnsherr’s eyes, his jaw square and his shoulders straight, ready for the rebuke. Ready for her to shut the door on him. Ready for anything, he thought.

He wasn’t.

“Of course I know him,” Erika Xavier née Lehnsherr whispered in a choked voice as she reached out for him. “He’s my son.”


End file.
